As the fourth season of Trying lands, things have moved on a lot for the sparky everycouple, played by Rafe Spall and Esther Smith. Their painful journey through infertility, from season one, is long behind them. The two kids they adopted tortuously through seasons two and three, Princess and Tyler, are now cranky, wisecracking youths.
Princess, now played by Scarlett Rayner, is especially good. “It’s always surprising how good young people are at acting,” Rafe Spall says, when I meet him in a cafe in London. There’s almost always a self-mocking joke lurking in what he says, if you care to chase it down, here a subtext of: “What kind of job is that, that a 15-year-old can do?” At 41, Spall is chiselled and handsome, maybe surprisingly so if your stored visual memory is from Shaun of the Dead, in 2004, before he totally inhabited his features. He’s amazingly tall, but perhaps only if you’re expecting him to be the same height as his dad, Timothy Spall.
